The invention disclosed herein relates to cassettes for recording information and more particularly to a cassette, apparatus and method for removing selected segments for storage and other purposes from a recording medium having particular information recorded in particular segments of its length. In applications where it is desirable to record a large number of relatively short segments of audio information, such as witness interviews for insurance investigations, it has been found that use of conventional cassette recorders provides the features of good fidelity, portability and ease of handling. However, experience has shown that the storage of entire conventional cassettes in files is bulky and wastes a great deal of space, especially when only a small percentage of the available recording time is used on each cassette. Moreover, when it is necessary that each file contain only particular recorded information, the storing of entire cassettes is costly since there must be a cassette for each file even though the particular recorded information in the file requires only a small portion of the tape available in a cassette.
Thus, to avoid the wasted space, bulk and expense involved in the storage of complete cassettes or a pair of reels from a cassette, it is desirable to remove segments from the length of tape in a cassette for storage while at the same time leaving the cassette operational to record information on any segments of the length of the tape which do not require storage or are unused. To accomplish this method of storage, some users have extracted the tape through the front opening of a conventional cassette, cut out the portion on which the information to be stored is recorded, and spliced the remaining ends back together. However, there are several problems with this method of removing small segments from the length of tape in a cassette for storage or other purposes.
The splicing operation is time consuming and difficult to master, especially with the one-eighth inch width tape used in standard cassettes. Also, the physical strength of the splice may be inferior to that of the tape and can lead to breakage during subsequent use. Unless the splice is done with great precision, the splice can lead to clogging of the tape head gap, or to the tape becoming wrapped around a transport spindle or capstan.
Prior art cassettes have provided no ready alternative to this splicing method and its problems since they have been of two types: those glued or in some other fashion permanently closed; and those held together by screws so that the top portion and bottom portion of the cassette body may be separated by removing the screws. To remove and store a small segment of the tape in a cassette of the first type, only the above described splicing method may be used.
While it is possible to disassemble prior art cassettes of the second type so that the take-up reel and a segment of the length of tape in the cassette may be removed as an alternative to the splicing of tape described above, these prior art cassettes require that the entire interior of the cassette be exposed with the result that the supply reel and those segments of the tape remaining in the cassette may be dislodged from their operational positions. Even when this does not occur, the obtaining of a segment of the length of tape from those prior cassettes of the second type for storage is time consuming because of the screws to be removed and the difficulty generally encountered in attaching the remaining segments of the tape to a new take-up reel for additional use in the cassette.